Perfectionism, as I would say, is the act of putting efforts into a work until all defects are gone, or to get it as close to perfection as it can be. By itself, it can be nice, meaning that you are able to do high quality work, but it tends towards being a problem when you don’t set limits. In a perfect world, we would have unlimited time to do everything we want and people would appreciate the efforts we put into our work, but we don’t live in this kind of world. In this world, we all have thousands of things to do and people expect results (fast).
You have to be able to see what won’t add value to what you’re doing (not only $$$, but what won’t be worth the time and efforts). It’s better to get something done, even if it has some flaws, than having something perfect but incomplete because you lost interest and hope in finishing the project someday. The imperfect work will most of the time be of better value than the incomplete one. Would you rather have a complete car that you have to bring to the garage from time to time or have a perfect half that you can’t drive?
I used to be a perfectionist, in my case, so I was putting so much time in my projects that I would lose interest before getting things done almost everytime. My mindset was: If I do something, I better do it well. At some point, I came to realize that I hadn’t accomplished much interesting things in my life, it was time for me to change my lifestyle. I felt like it was time to start doing things and getting them done. The mindset became more of an incremental one: I’ll do the best I can now, see the results, and do better next time. In other words, I’ll do things the best way I can at that moment, finish the project, learn from it, and in the next project I’ll have more experience and I will deliver a better work.
I’ll give you an example, since I was a kid, I always dreamed about making music, I play guitar, bass, and I’m currently “learning” piano, but I never really made any song. The reason? Everytime I play one of my instruments, what comes out of it never satisfies me, it never sounds as good as the bands I like. So I ended up thinking that I was a bad musician and nearly stopped playing music altogether. But have you ever listened to your favorite band’s first album or demo songs? They sound really different from their later work but they still have that appeal that makes you like them. Of course I’ll feel bad about myself if I compare what I do to the work of someone with years of experience ahead of me. But if I choose to do it anyway no matter how bad it seems to sound, I’ll build experience, and the more I fight this feeling, the more I’ll get experience and the better it will sound. And maybe someday I’ll listen to my favorite band and say to myself “I can do that too” and actually do it.
But don’t go thinking that I encourage people to do bad work just for getting it done, I’m saying that we have to know our limits and work according to them, always push them a little further everytime without getting too far. If we take back my music creation as an example, I know I will probably not be able to write a symphony in the first few months, but I for sure can write some more simple music that sounds good. And little by little I’ll get better at it and someday I’ll be able to create something as good as my expectations of it.